If you can keep animals active, obviously they’re better exhibits and are better information for the public. So I went back home and, little by little, I began to experiment. We kept small groups behind the reptile house. We kept small groups of insects and local insects because there were… Read More
It’s been private people or researchers. I mean, we were very competent people and we know what we’re doing in those areas. We don’t want our animals running all over the place. So they got more and more confident with us, and they started allowing me to bring in exotics,… Read More
And at that time, early on animals were sold rather than given away as they are today. So that’s the way we funded that program. You had the vision of changing the exhibits. Read More
What did you want to do with exhibitry and how did it change over your time as director?… Read More
The Cincinnati Zoo, obviously we stepped into an old zoo and it was very popular in zoos to theme their parks. Not only their parks, but their exhibits. They would do an African area in the zoo or an Asian area. This was very difficult in Cincinnati. So I chose… Read More
And when we did it, we put those rhinos together and there was no fighting, just love and a lot of love, and that produced the first captive- I think it was probably, in my own mind, they say that there was an animal born in 1888 in Calcutta, but… Read More
Did you have to sell this to the people who were helping you with the funding or not?… Read More
The way I was able to fund the Sumatran rhino project is, a number of years ago, and it didn’t, it took the board a few years to catch on to me in this area, but they eventually caught me. I said that I would not expect any money for… Read More
Her name was Betsy Dresser. Eventually she got her PhD and she was a reproductive physiologist, and she badly wanted to work in zoos and she badly wanted to work in the Cincinnati Zoo. And she thought there would be great application for reproductive science in zoo animals, that we… Read More
So we developed a Carl H. Lindner, it’s called CREW, the Center for the Reproduction of Endangered Wildlife. And Betsy was our first director of research. And the first remarkable thing she did was she took- It was the first time it had ever been done, where one species was… Read More
One eland got pregnant and developed, one species giving birth to another, it was the first time it was ever done, and it hit the front pages all over the world. And we’ve been able, as time goes on, we’ve been able to really increase our role in that science. Read More
Whenever you try to put the male and female together, they would about kill each other. And I tried to get Betsy involved in doing more research on it. I thought if you could time the estrus of the rhino, perhaps putting them together at that time, it would be… Read More
And the parakeet was because of women’s fashion. At the turn of the century or before the turn of the century, it was very popular for women to wear feathers in their hats, the millinery industry and the birds were killed off and also for the pet industry even even… Read More
And I think the icing on the cake was that when we began to disassemble the building, we found an original cage plaque of the Carolina parakeet. So we saved one of those buildings, we moved it and we made it a commemorative small museum that commemorates the loss of… Read More
Maruska. Okay, we are all set. Tell me how important science and research was to your vision and generally to zoos in the United States or around the world. I think what zoos do best is to, and what their real purpose and passion, I mean their immediate purpose and… Read More
How tricky was it to preserve the historical treasures, these monuments to these animals and balance saving the heritage and developing new facilities at the zoo?… Read More
These were kind of monuments that might not be moved. Read More
How did that work in with the whole vision you had for the zoo?… Read More
The Cincinnati Zoo and we can be perhaps a little closer to extinction than any other zoo, since we had two very highly visible species, the last of which died in our zoo, Martha, the last passenger pigeon, one of the most abundant of all land birds. Audubon and Wilson… Read More
Obviously it leaves them at a loss. So somehow we have to control population by at least 40%. We have to cut carbon by the year 2020. That’s half the time, or we may hit the tipping point. And when you hit the tipping point, forget it, there’s no coming… Read More